A friend had problem exporting his contacts from Outlook to Gmail. He followed the solutions that you can find around the internet, that suggested to export the contacts to a CSV file, and import that into Gmail. But all his contacts came up as blank, they had no names, phone numbers and email addresses was some times placed correct, sometimes not. Almost all the information about the contacts was saved in the Notes field.....

After some investigation the CSV file that Outlook produced had Norwegian headings. They (producer of outlook) have translated the CSV heading!!!! Why? I can see a couple of good reasons for this, but they are outweigh by what I think is the major reason, and that is to make the export incompatible with other programs..... Gmail off course did not recognize this.

Well, what to do... Manually translate the headers would take some time, and would probably resulted in misspelling, ++. So I exported a file from Gmail, in the format that Outlook would like, and compared the heading. This resulted in a translation table I have saved in CSV, and included in the bottom of this page. I'm not shore

So if you do have a bash commandline available you can download this CSV file, save it with your CSV file from Outlook, and run the following command. Change YOUR_OUTLOOK_EXPORTED.CSV to your filename:

This should fix your file. The only problem that you now can run into is if we have different text encodings. So when you are finished check the resulting file, and see if the fields that had the special characters æ, ø and å in them are correct translated. If so, just import the file into Gmail.

So why do I have this HOWTO in english.... This problem probably apply to all other translations of Outlook as well, so for other languages, here you have my solution, you only need to create your translation file your self....

Her are the translation table. This is also available in a CSV file here: